> The only "user friendly" approach is to allow ties between different > notes and slurs between identical notes. Anything else is merely > harrassing your users with silly intellectual hair splitting.
Tried playing the McFarlan MS tune "Shuffle and Cut" I posted a while back via a player program or MIDI converter with the slurs replaced by ties? In fact, tried to play it on a real instrument that way? If we are to support computer playback of ABC files at all, this distinction is essential. It's immediately obvious whenever you try to turn ABC into anything other than a graphical score. If people want their ABC tunes to be computer-playable, and transcriber X writes stuff that plays as nonsense, those people aren't going to go back to transcriber X's site to look for more. If some transcribers don't get it, too bad. There are tunes out there with all kinds of misconceptions about what ABC constructs mean. Nobody needs to use them when there are better alternatives, and for any reasonably popular tune there always will be alternatives. Eventually crap ABC will die. (One great advantage of a standard that slowly mutates to be incompatible with older versions is that the early, sloppy efforts get left behind - is there *any* tune out there using + for chords that we need to preserve?) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ food intolerance data & recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
